I am working on the Wooden Ships & Iron Men module. This is a game of naval warfare around the Napoleonic Age.
All games are unique, and WS&IM special feature is that the counters (ships) are two hexes long. The center of a counter is therefore supposed to be in the middle of a hex edge. There are six such positions in every hex, but an additional complication is that only two of them are legal depending on what direction the ship is pointing.
In the original WS&IM module the designer fixed this problem by making each ship 3 hexes long with an invisible part about half the length of each counter. This 3-hex counter is then centered in the middle of the center hex and gives the illusion of extending two hexes with the center on an edge.
The problem with this solution is that a selected ship still has a selection box around it that is 3 hexes long. This is just a cosmetic problem, but I am thinking of ways of fixing it.
One way is to add a layer trait in the Game Piece Palette with the image of the counter and the correct offset. The image of the Basic Piece trait is then set to No Image. Unfortunately this still produces a selection box that looks bigger than the apparent size of the counter.
Another way is to use an Irregular Grid and define every hex edge to be a region. The hex grid itself then has to be included as part of the underlying background image of the board. But since there is no hex grid there is also no trait for rotating the ship.
I suppose the only way of doing this is to extend a Java class. I notice that the VASL module has a means of placing counters on edges for indicating bypass movement, but likely no command for rotating the counter in that position, so some new code is needed?